Mary Chesnut

Mary Boykin Chesnut (31 March 1823-22 November 1886) was a South Carolina socialite and diarist who was the wife of US Senator James Chesnut Jr.. During the American Civil War, she started a journal which she intended to be entirely objective, and her diary was published in 1905, 19 years after her death.

Biography
Mary Boykin Miller was born in Stateburg, South Carolina in 1823, the daughter of US Senator Stephen Decatur Miller. The family lived in Charleston, and she was well-educated, becoming fluent in French and German; she also secretly harbored anti-slavery views. At the age of 13, she met 21-year-old James Chesnut Jr. in Charleston, and she married him in 1840 at the age of 17. They initially lived on Chesnut's plantation near Camden, and they later resided at a cottage in Columbia during the American Civil War. During the war, Chesnut went through depressions which occasionally caused her to take opium, and she decided to keep an objective journal which would provide a "vivid picture of a society in the throes of its life-and-death struggle." She worked toward a final form of her book from 1881 to 1884, and she gave the diary to her friend Isabella D. Martin before she died in 1886, hoping that Martin would publish it. It was published in 1905 in a heavily edited and abridged edition, and C. Vann Woodward's 1981 annotated edition of the diary won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for History.